News Publishers Unite in Legal Battle Against Microsoft and OpenAI
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A coalition of major news publishers has filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI, accusing the tech giants of unlawfully using copyrighted articles to train their generative AI models without permission or payment.
First reported by The Verge, the group of eight publications owned by Alden Global Capital (AGC) – including the Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, and Orlando Sentinel – allege the companies have purloined “millions” of their articles without permission and without payment “to fuel the commercialisation of their generative artificial intelligence products, including ChatGPT and Copilot.”
The lawsuit is the latest legal action taken against Microsoft and OpenAI over their alleged misuse of copyrighted content to build large language models (LLMs) that power AI technologies like ChatGPT. In the complaint, the AGC publications claim the companies’ chatbots can reproduce their articles verbatim shortly after publication, without providing prominent links back to the original sources.
This lawsuit is not about the clash between old and new technologies. It does not signify a fight between an industry flourishing and an industry in a phase of transition. Above all, it does not aim to address the multitude of social, political, moral, and economic issues that GenAI brings to the fore,” the complaint states.
It’s about the belief that Microsoft and OpenAI should not be allowed to use copyright-protected newspaper content to establish their new trillion-dollar ventures without paying for the content’s usage.
Additionally, the plaintiffs are accusing the AI models of “hallucinations,” crediting incorrect reporting to their respective publications. They point to OpenAI’s earlier acknowledgement that it would be “impossible” to prepare today’s leading AI models without the use of copyrighted materials.
These accusations are similar to those posed by The New York Times in a different lawsuit filed last year. In that lawsuit, the Times alleged that Microsoft and OpenAI used almost a century’s worth of copyrighted matter to enable their AI to mimic its expressive style, without securing a licensing deal.
In pursuit of dismissing important aspects of the Times’ lawsuit, Microsoft has labeled the paper as dealing in “doomsday futurology”, implying that generative AI might pose a threat to autonomous journalism.
AGC publications maintain that OpenAI, currently valued at $90 billion following its transformation to a for-profit firm, and Microsoft – which has witnessed its market value increase by hundreds of billions of dollars due to ChatGPT and Copilot – are profiting from the unauthorized use of copyrighted pieces.
The news publishers are demanding unidentified damages and a command for Microsoft and OpenAI to annihilate any GPT and LLM patterns that use their copyrighted content.
Earlier in the week, OpenAI finalized a licensing partnership with The Financial Times for lawful incorporation of the newspaper’s journalism. Yet, the latest lawsuit from AGC magnifies the escalating strife between tech firms creating generative AI and content creators who are apprehensive about the unregulated usage of their works for propelling profitable AI systems.
(Photo by Wesley Tingey)
See also: OpenAI faces complaint over fictional outputs
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Tags: ai, artificial intelligence, chatgpt, copyright, large language model, llm, microsoft, openai
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